Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities.
So wrote John Updike in his
moving tribute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams -- an appropriately pedigreed account for this
oldest and
most fabled of ballfields that saw
its first major league game played
one century ago today.
As a team
in flux hopes to recapture the magic with an
old-school face-off against the New York
Highlanders Yankees, it's hard to imagine the soul of the Sox faced the
specter of
demolition not too long ago. Now
legally preserved, in a sport crowded with corporate-branded superdome behemoths,
Fenway abides, bursting with
history,
idiosyncrasy,
record crowds, and occasional
song.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 20, 2012 -
48 comments
Earth in perspective:
- Stratocam takes the most beautiful landscape satellite photographs from Google Maps, as voted on by visitors, and switches them every few seconds, with a fullscreen mode.
- ChronoZoom is an interactive, zoomable HTML5 timeline of the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens, with embedded video and lectures.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Mar 17, 2012 -
10 comments
"Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history, is still unseen and unexplored." Beautifully understated,
The Black Vernacular is a communal memorial to this history.
[more inside]
posted by sudama
on Mar 14, 2012 -
12 comments
World War II in Photos "A retrospective of World War II in large-size photo stories. 900 photos in all, over 20 chapters, telling many of the countless millions of stories from the biggest conflict and biggest story of the 20th century."
[via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by bru
on Nov 1, 2011 -
34 comments
Ana Lee's fashion blog is in Russian but with its insane number of HQ photographs
[don't forget to click the "далее"], you won't care. For example, her two posts about
Carol Alt almost certainly comprise the greatest documentation of that model's career to be found anywhere in the world.
posted by Trurl
on Aug 28, 2011 -
6 comments
"
Howe snapped more than 400
photographs in Moscow and St. Petersburg with his hand held
Graflex camera, a state-of-the-art device that allowed its user to shoot without a tripod. His photographs of pedestrians, street vendors and aristocrats are rare glimpses of everyday life before the upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution — and sparked huge interest in Russia among history buffs and local museums."
posted by gman
on May 10, 2011 -
20 comments
The Burns Archive is a collection of over 700,000 historical photographs that document
disturbing subject matter: obsolete medical practices and experiments, death, disease, disasters, crime, revolutions, riots and war. Newsweek posted a
select gallery this past October, as well as a
video interview and walk-through with curator and collector Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York opthalmologist.
(Via) (Content at links may be disturbing to some.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 26, 2011 -
15 comments
A large chunk of the
Yad Vashem Photo Archive has been made available online. The first batch consists of 130,000 photographs and more will follow. The photos and their keywords are indexed and searchable via Google. Readers can contribute to the archive project by adding stories, comments and further documents linked to the photos. Photos range from the
horrific to the
charmingly mundane.
[more inside]
posted by jonesor
on Jan 26, 2011 -
11 comments
Vintage photos of women in sport. "At the turn of the last century women in the western world were finding a voice, both collectively and individually. As the Victorian era lapsed in to memory and the Edwardian Era commenced many women chose to pursue sports."
[more inside]
posted by gman
on Nov 18, 2010 -
14 comments
Slaves of the moment: "The Mexican
Agustín Víctor Casasola, with the intermittent help of his brother Miguel, began to set up around 1900 one of the most important
photographic archives for the
history of a country. However, the international recognition of these almost 500,000
photos has not matched its importance. Born in 1874 and raised in the years of the Porfirio Díaz government, Agustín Casasola was a direct
witness to all the adversities that led to modern Mexico, and breathed as nobody else the air of a country and a city that developed during the first third of the 20th century at a runaway pace."
posted by puny human
on Nov 11, 2010 -
8 comments
Critical Past Claiming 57k historic videos and 7MM photos free to browse (pay to download). Single-link-dig-through-it-yourself-and-let-us-know-if-you-find-anything-great, okay?
posted by Ufez Jones
on Jun 24, 2010 -
29 comments
Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan. "It is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan's youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived."
posted by availablelight
on Jun 3, 2010 -
8 comments
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
[another great find at Postroad's blog (NSFW)]
posted by caddis
on May 19, 2010 -
21 comments
